We’ll get started with the major landmark in Keokuk. The Cahokia Power Plant was just one cog in a much larger machine that Union Electric didn’t build but purchased shortly after its completion at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

Keokuk and St. Louis have more than one link, and the first we will talk about is the shared legacy of the work of Robert E. Lee when he was a member of the Army Corps of Engineers. Many people know he dredged and built a dyke that scoured out the Mississippi riverbed and saved the Levee in St. Louis, ensuring that commerce would continue to land at the Gateway City before the Civil War. But Lee also surveyed and proposed a canal that eased travel around the Des Moines Rapids on the Mississippi at Keokuk in 1832 (it’s confusing, while the capital of Des Moines is much further west, the Des Moines River is a tributary of the Mississippi whose confluence with the later is just south of Keokuk, hence the name of the rapids). The canal was actually not completed until 1877.

Fast forward to 1913, and a new dam, which was apparently the largest construction site in the world at the time, and the old canal was flooded due to the massive size of its new neighbor. The massive project began in 1905 with the Keokuk and Hamilton Water Power Company, and would eventually stretch to just shy of a mile long.

Of course, there is a lock at the dam, which is now known as Lock No. 19 in the greater system of locks and dams maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers, which it joined in 1930.

The dam competed in size to the first Aswan Dam over the Nile River, also being built at the same time.

The swing bridge, which carries a railroad track, is still in operation. We realized that the bridge was probably moved into the open position in anticipation of an approaching barge that was entering the lock in the near future.

Union Electric, the St. Louis utility, purchased the dam in 1925, incorporating it into its constellation of power generating facilities. The plants on the map below are slowly disappearing, one by one.

There was an attempt at marketing of a “Lake Keokuk” above the dam, but for the most part it is just a wide area in the river. I don’t know how much recreation occurs on this section.

Here is a turbine pit under construction.

Of course, the turbines and generators are replaced from time to time, and just in the last year or so one of the disused ones has been put on display in downtown, showing the size of the massive pieces of steel machinery. The turbines obviously spin generators which creates electricity. If more water is flowing to the dam than the turbines can handle, flood gates on the dam are opened to relieve pressure.

Views of the dam and power house are viewed from the remnants of an old bridge from west bank of the river.

Here is an aerial view of the dam, most likely shortly before Union Electric purchased the dam and power plant.